Delaney emerged from the dim subway and into a world of sterling light. The day was clear, and the sun struck the Bay’s numberless waves and threw golden sparks everywhere. Delaney turned away from the water and walked the hundred feet to the Every campus. This alone—taking the subway, making her way to the gate unaccompanied, without a vehicle—made her an anomaly and confused the gate’s two guards standing in their booth. Their domain was glass, pyramidal, like the tip of a crystalline obelisk.
“You walked here?” asked one of the guards. ROWENA, by her badge, was maybe thirty, raven-haired and dressed in a crisp yellow top, snug like a bicycle bib. She smiled, revealing an endearing gap between her two front teeth.
Delaney provided her name, and said that she had an interview with Dan Faraday.
“Finger, please?” Rowena asked.
Delaney put her thumb on the scanner and a grid of photos, videos and data appeared on Rowena’s screen. There were pictures of Delaney she hadn’t seen herself—was that a gas station in Montana? In the full-body shots, she was slouching, the burden of her too-tall teenhood. Standing by the booth, Delaney straightened her posture as her eyes wandered over images of her in her Park Ranger uniform, at a mall in Palo Alto, riding a bus in what looked to be Twin Peaks.
“You grew your hair out,” Rowena said. “Still short, though.”
Delaney reflexively ran her fingers through her thick black bob. “Says your eyes are green,” Rowena said. “They look brown. Can you get closer?” Delaney got closer. “Ah! Pretty,” Rowena said. “I’ll call Dan.”
While Rowena was contacting Faraday, another snafu occupied the second guard, a gaunt and sullen man of about fifty. A white van had pulled up, and the driver, a red-bearded man sitting high above the guards’ window, explained that he had a delivery.
“Delivery of what?” the gaunt guard asked.
The driver briefly turned his head toward the back of the van, as if to be sure of his impending description. “It’s a bunch of baskets. Gift baskets. Stuffed animals, chocolate, that kind of thing,” he said.
Now Rowena, whom Delaney assumed was the alpha of the glass obelisk, took over. “How many baskets?” she asked.
“I don’t know. About twenty,” the driver said.
“And is anyone expecting these?” Rowena asked.
“I don’t know. I think it’s for potential clients maybe?” the driver said, a sudden exhaustion in his voice. This was evidently a conversation already far longer than what he was accustomed to. “I think these are just gifts for some people that work here,” he said, and reached to the passenger seat, where he found a tablet and tapped it a few times. “It says these are for Regina Martinez and the Initiative K Team.”
“And who is the sender?” Rowena asked. Her tone, now, was almost amused. It was clear, to Delaney at least, that this particular delivery would not be consummated.
Again the driver consulted his tablet. “It says the sender is something called MDS. Just M-D-S.” Now the driver’s voice had, too, taken on a fatalistic tone. Would it matter, he seemed to wonder, if he even knew what MDS stood for?
Rowena’s face softened. She murmured into a microphone, apparently speaking to a different security phalanx within the Every. “Never mind. I’ve got it. It’s a turnaround.” She tilted her head sympathetically to the driver. “You can turn around just up here.” She pointed to a cul-de-sac fifteen yards ahead.
“So I drop the baskets there?” the driver asked.
Rowena smiled again. “Oh no. We won’t be accepting your…”—the pause seemed meant to allow sufficient venom to accumulate for the next, heretofore benign, word—“baskets.”•
Excerpted from The Every, by Dave Eggers. Published by Vintage. © 2021 Dave Eggers. All rights reserved.
